The Life Foundations
Nexus
Seminar
On The ‘True Text’ On-line Lessons
SEMINAR ON THE “TRUE
TEXT”
LESSON 4 – THE ALEXANDRIAN
PRINCIPLE
Copyright
June 6, 2005 12:02 PM CST
By Dr.
Michael J. Bisconti
The “Alexandrian
Principle” states:
The Alexandrian Stream of
transmission is flawed but contains unflawed content. This makes the Alexandrian stream of transmission a doubled-edged
sword. In other words, the Alexandrian
stream has had an unfavorable as well as a favorable impact on biblical textual
criticism. The unfavorable consequence
has been the TEMPORARY (technically temporary because it has actually been over
100 years) reduction in the number of Golden Verses. The favorable consequence has been the discovery of an ADDITIONAL
means of identifying the “true text.”
Below, you will find the
first twelve verses of the Book of Jude.
Verses 1 through 11 are IDENTICAL in all streams of transmission ONCE
THE ALEXANDRIAN STREAM IS REMOVED. The
graphic below provides the realistic picture of the number of Golden Verses in
this passage. Looking at this graphic
you would think that we should not have considered the Alexandrian stream at
all. However, note the following:
1.
A Golden Verse is NOT
superior to either a Silver Verse or a Bronze Verse. All verse types are of equal value.
2.
The Alexandrian Stream
required that we treat a number of Golden Verses as Silver Verses. As a result, these previously hidden Golden
Verses now have TWICE the scholastic and scientific foundation and proof than
they otherwise would have had.
Immediately following the
passage from the book of Jude is an explanation of the conventions used in our
Greek text. The following graphic takes
awhile to load.
This
passage from the Book of Jude is taken from a compilation of the Greek New
Testament that has variants identified and tagged for reference to source
of transmission and schools of emphasis.
Verse
Numbers
For ease
of reference, the verse numbering scheme has been made to conform closely to
that found in most standard English versions of the New Testament, following
the Authorized (King James) Version of 1611.
Where considerate verse numbering differences occur, they are added to
the text in brackets.
Breathings,
Accents, And Diacritical Markings
All
breathings, accents, capitalization, punctuation, and diacritical markings have
been omitted. These are primarily a
product of modern editorship and are lacking in ancient manuscripts.
Book
Titles And Colophons
Book
titles do not appear. The Greek closing
colophons to the epistles that appear in the English of the Authorized Version
have been placed in brackets [] wherever they occur in the Stephens 1550
edition (only).
Variant
Tagging Method
The
following tags have been applied to those words peculiar to one stream of
transmission or scholarly group that emphasizes a particular variant word. Those words with no tag do not differ in the
various printings of the Greek.
T = Stephens 1550 Textus Receptus.
The text
used is George Ricker Berry's edition of "The Interlinear Literal
Translation of the Greek New Testament."
This text is virtually identical to Erasmus 1516, Beza 1598, and the
actual Textus Receptus: Elzevir 1633.
Berry states, "In the main they are one and the same; and [any] of
them may be referred to as the Textus Receptus." (Berry, p. ii)
These
early printed Greek New Testaments closely parallel the text of the English
King James Authorized Version of 1611, since that version was based closely
upon Beza 1598, which differed little from its "Textus Receptus"
predecessors. These Textus Receptus
editions follow the Byzantine Majority manuscripts, which was predominant
during the period of manual copying of Greek New Testament manuscripts.
S = Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus
The text
used is "h Kainh Diaqhkh:
The New Testament. The Greek Text
underlying the English Authorized Version of 1611" (London: Trinitarian
Bible Society, 1977). This is an
unchanged reprint of Scrivener's "The New Testament in the Original Greek
according to the Text followed in the Authorized Version" (Cambridge:
University Press, 1894, 1902).
Scrivener attempted to reconstruct the
Greek text underlying the English 1611 KJV for comparison to the 1881 English
Revised Version. In those places where
the KJV followed the Latin Vulgate (John 10:16), Scrivener inserted the Greek
reading, as opposed to back-translating the Latin to Greek--which would have
produced a Greek word with no Greek manuscript evidence. Scrivener's work follows the Byzantine
Majority texts, and in many places matches the modern Alexandrian-based
editions.
B = Byzantine Majority
The text is that identified by Freiherr Von
Soden, "Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer altesten erreichbaren
Textgestalt" (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1911) and Herman C.
Hoskier, "Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse" (London: Bernard
Quaritch, 1929). This technique of
Byzantine identification and weighting was utilized by Hodges and Farsted in
"The Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text" (Nashville:
Thomas Nelson, 1982; 1985). It was
subsequently utilized by Robinson and Pierpont, resulting in 99.75 percent
agreement between the two texts.
The Byzantine Majority text is closely
identified with the Textus Receptus editions, and well it should with greater
than 98% agreement. As Maurice Robinson
pointed out in his edition of the Byzantine Majority: "George Ricker Berry
correctly noted that 'in the main they are one and the same; and [any] of them
may be referred to as the Textus Receptus' (George Ricker Berry, ed., The
Interlinear Literal Translation of the Greek New Testament [New York: Hinds
& Noble, 1897], p. ii).
A = Alexandrian
(Some of the comments
that follow will be confusing to anyone learned in the “Alexandrian
dispute.” We will clear up this
confusion at a later stage in the “text building” process.) The differences are those identified by the
United Bible Society, 3rd edition, and utilized by modern translations such as
the NIV and the NASB. While these
variants come from manuscripts with less textual evidence than the Byzantine
Majority, many of the differences are exactly the same as those identified by
the Byzantine Majority and Scrivener.
The percentage of variants is quite small and occurs mainly in word placement
and spelling. Many of the variations
identified are omitted or bracketed words, which is not surprising due to a
significantly smaller base of text from this stream of transmission.